RESULTS:

• Substantial increase in safety
• Greater customer comfort
• Significant reduction in electricity consumption
• Secure remote monitoring and control

CHALLENGE: 

Bennet shopping malls and hypermarkets were previously equipped with lighting systems consisting of electromechanical actuators and timer-controllers. This technology was limiting because it could not be configured or controlled remotely and prevented standardization across its chain. Thanks to the support of industrial and building automation company Interel Trading, Bennet has become a pioneer within the Italian large-scale shopping industry by implementing a digital system for the monitoring and control of lighting in hypermarkets.

SOLUTION:

The control and the supervision system provided by Interel manages all the lighting systems of the hypermarket, including storage warehouses, commercial galleries, sales areas and food processing areas. The solution also interacts with third-party systems, such as the anti-intrusion system, uninterruptible power supplies and refrigerated counters. A single PC with Emerson’s Movicon SCADA software is installed in each shopping mall. This acts as the local human machine interface (HMI) and allows the technical staff at the hypermarket to view and control the status of the entire facility and select specific lighting scenarios, as required. Through a secure VPN connection, operators at the Bennet Headquarters in Motano Lucino can easily access the PCs located in the various malls and make adjustments to the sequences and scenarios remotely. The Movicon user management functionality ensures that all access to the lighting management is regulated. The Movicon software also provides both in store and remote technicians with the ability to consult the system error logs and alarm history. The overall operating status of the lighting system can be viewed through HMI pages created in the Movicon SCADA software. It is possible to check the status of the lights, brightness level, ballast diagnostics, and diagnostics for individual lamps and the entire line. All these data and the different operating modes are stored by Movicon in a central database. This enables the status and functions to be reviewed using the Movicon analysis tool and should a fault occur, allows the operator to trace the origin of the malfunction. Movicon also records and visualizes the lighting brightness levels and visitor detection through dedicated graphs and tables to show trends. Greater control of the lighting has helped increase customer comfort at the hypermarkets, with significant reduction in electricity consumption achieved while the diagnostic functionality has helped increase safety by enabling faults to be quickly identified.